California is in a drought — and not just a drought of water, but also a drought of fire. But how is that possible when the state has been experiencing more large and destructive fires than ever in recent years? Well, many fire experts say these extreme fires are largely due to a lack of fire, through a century of wildfire suppression and not getting enough deliberate or “good” fire on the ground.
When set at the right time, intentional fires — often referred to as prescribed, controlled or cultural burns — can help reduce hazardous fuels that often stoke megafires and also keep land healthy. But one of the biggest challenges is how to treat more land with this type of fire.
In Butte County, a network of volunteers is working to help. Developed by the county’s Resource Conservation District (RCD), the group is known as the Butte Prescribed Burn Association (PBA). It’s one of 20 PBAs that have been formed in California and describes itself as "neighbors helping neighbors put good fire on the ground.” Over the past 14 months, it’s conducted 11 burns totaling 58 acres in the county.
Wolfy Rougle, the PBA’s coordinator, said in an email that the work consisted of 1,700 volunteer hours. She recently spoke with NSPR’s Sarah Bohannon about the PBA and why prescribed fire is a skill she hopes more county residents will learn.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
On how much prescribed fire is needed in Butte County
Based on an analysis of fire return interval data that was created by the Forest Service, the RCD and Fire Safe Council … 36,250 acres should be treated each year with fire or a fire surrogate in the forested areas of just Butte County. If we assume wildfire can treat 50% of the need and humans are taking responsibility for the rest, that would mean a target of 18,125 acres in Butte County each year.
If you're standing somewhere in a Butte County forest, you're probably standing on an acre that rightfully should be burning every five to 15 years. We have pretty short fire return intervals here. So we need a lot of fire.— Wolfy Rougle, Butte PBA Coordinator
That doesn't all have to be fire, but fire is by far the most cost-effective way to treat land. If you're standing somewhere in a Butte County forest, you're probably standing on an acre that rightfully should be burning every five to 15 years. We have pretty short fire return intervals here. So we need a lot of fire.
All of Butte County is fire adapted. The difference between the different ecological communities is just a matter of the fire return interval. So, you might have like a community of MacNab cypress way out on serpentine that seems to hardly ever burn but it still depends on fire to reproduce. It just needs really high intensity fire every 80 to 100 years. And then you might have a valley oak woodland right down by the creek and it's fire dependent too — even though you know obviously it can survive for many, many, many years without fire — but to reach its full potential and to have good baby oak recruitment and to have good healthy acorns it would be probably pretty common to have that valley oak forest underburn every five to 10 years, or around there. And black oak, ponderosa pine woodland loves to burn every five years on a south facing slope. So as all those different vegetation communities interlock and make the beautiful diverse mosaic that we see across Butte County that mosaic of vegetation communities is also really a mosaic of fire returns. And that biodiversity we see is both the driver and the result of pyrodiversity, which is a diversity of fire regimes.
On why Rougle says fire needs be part of California’s goal to treat one million acres per year
Realistically, I mean, way more than half of that would need to be with fire. That's the only way to meet that target. So that's 500,000 to 600,000 acres of prescribed fire a year that California wants to take responsibility for.
Over the last couple decades, Cal Fire has averaged maybe 15,000 to 40,000 acres. So much less than 10% of what is required per year. And that's not anything against Cal Fire, they're working with a lot of barriers too just like the rest of us, but this is not a problem that we can just sit back and wait for professionals to solve. Nobody's coming to save us from our fire deficit.
Collectively, the private landowners of California control I think something like 40% of the forestland, and that's not even industrial landowners, that's just ordinary folks who might have 5, 10, 100, 500 acres of forestland. And here in Butte County, it's about that, it’s 40% or 45% of the forestland in our county is held by just ordinary people. So we can't ignore the contributions that those people and the land that they control is going to make to our community-wide resilience. And we've got to get good fire into those folks' hands as a tool.
On how the Butte Prescribed Burn Association works
The PBA is a program that the RCD started so that mostly private landowners can get help putting good fire on the ground, kind of from each other. So we connect neighbors with each other. Connect folks who just kind of want to find out what fire is all about. Some folks have a lot of burning experience that could be formal or informal. But some folks have no fire experience at all, because fire is a skill that you can learn. And folks just get together, beginners and experienced, and they burn on private landowners' land. And so the requirements in terms of qualifications and PPE [Personal Protective Equipment] are pretty basic because we want to keep barriers as low as is consistent with having a safe burn. The [Butte PBA] is pretty much a mailing list. And it has [more than] 200 people on it, who sign up to receive our good fire news and to be notified when a landowner wants to do a burn.
The landowners decide when they want to burn, how they want to burn, how many folks they want there. They sign the permits and stuff. It's not like the PBA is doing that for them. What we are is a group of people who show up to help out as volunteers on a burn that the landowner is doing. And usually, when there's a burn about 20 people have been showing up, which is a comfortable workforce to burn five or 10 acres in a day. It works really well.
On prescribed fire as a responsibility
I just think caring for the land is really everybody's responsibility. If you live in a fire-adapted landscape, and certainly if you propose to own land in a fire-adapted landscape, I think it's your responsibility to know how to care for the land with fire.
I think most cultures that have lasted a long time in fire-adapted landscapes have seen it that way. It's a human responsibility to manage fire in a good way for our own benefit and for the benefit of all the other species that we share this land with, and it's something that anybody can do.
Once a fire is burning, even a thread of fire like a foot long, you can take that pitchfork and lift up some burning debris and just gently move it over a little bit and it catches and you're painting with fire across the landscape … When you have that experience of controlling fire in that way and realizing that it's a working partner, it really changes your attitude towards it. It’s very healing.— Wolfy Rougle, Butte PBA Coordinator
Most of us don't have a family tradition of fire. We don't have elders or mentors to teach us how to put good fire on the ground, so we have to cobble together a way for us to learn from each other and figure out how to do it but it's doable.
We’re familiar with things like chainsaws and trucks, and so we don't think anything of firing up a chainsaw or hopping in a truck and driving a load of firewood across our ranch or something. It’s pretty incredible that people know how to change the spark plugs and mix the fuel in their chainsaw, that can rev to however many RPMs and slice through a 24-inch, 300-year-old oak trunk. But fire is a tool that people have been using to manage the land for tens and tens of thousands of years. We assume that that's a very advanced skill that ordinary people couldn't learn. But they can.
On how to get started with learning about fire
I think the best thing, honestly, is for people to just come out to a burn. And you'll see that fire doesn't have to be something that you stand back from and watch with binoculars. We don't even always use drip torches to drip fuel onto the ground at our burns. Usually, somebody will just kneel down and light some pine needles and oak leaves and see how well they burn. And if they're doing well, and we're in prescription and everything, then the burn has started.
Our favorite tool to use, at least in oak-pine litter, is the pitchfork. Once a fire is burning, even a thread of fire like a foot long, you can take that pitchfork and lift up some burning debris and just gently move it over a little bit and it catches and you're painting with fire across the landscape. And you can really move fire at a very human pace that way. You're moving fire downhill, so it's not building up the momentum that it builds when it goes uphill, and you're just moving the fire along and working at its pace and having it work alongside you at your pace. And when you have that experience of controlling fire in that way and realizing that it's a working partner, it really changes your attitude towards it. It’s very healing.
On the limitations of the Butte Prescribed Burn Association
Since we're just getting started, the people who've been most able to take advantage of the PBA so far are the people who are already the best connected and best-resourced. As each community develops a deeper culture of burning, I'm hopeful that community burns will soon be within reach for, say, someone who doesn't already have a ton of ranch equipment or a huge social network.
On Rougle’s hope that more Butte County residents will get involved
Butte County is really fragmented in terms of ownership — there's federal lands, there's industrial lands, there's private nonindustrial lands — and we all need to be working together.
One way to do that is that there's a lot of people who maybe aren't even private landowners. There's a lot of folks in Chico. It's really fun to burn, and if you'd go join an ultimate frisbee game on a weekend, you would really love to go join a burn. The backlog is just so huge, and the need for people to help burn is so huge. There's private companies that are able to meet the need — of course that relies on the Forest Service having funding. There's multiple tribes that have developed or are developing burn crews that can help out on all lands. We're not going to really run out of ways to put good fire on the ground anytime soon.
Every fire is strategic for somebody. Every acre of black that we put on the ground is going to make either that patch of forest or somebody's home just a little bit more ready for wildfire. You don't always get to put a fire on the ground that potentially protects an entire city, but it all matters.
This story is part of NSPR’s Fire Returned series on cultural and prescribed burning in Butte County and has been supported by the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.
